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Many cylinder seal impressions on Persepolis Fortification tablets are abiding hieroglyphs of Indus writing. Many have been classified as heroic encounters or combats. Some hieroglyphs in these seal impressions do have vivid paralleld on Indus writing.
Many have inscriptions in Aramaic and some in Elamite, with the name of the owner of the seal, identified as son of...On PFS 32, the person ṣuddayauda is identified as kanzabara ('treasurer') and on PFS 1972 titled as kurdabattiṣ ('chief of workers'). Animals shown include lions, often winged, bird-headed lions, deer, wild goats, wild sheep.
PF 102. Cat. No. 1. Cylinder seal. Ht. 2 cm. Hero faces right, arms straight at horizontal; hero grasps two rampant bulls by throat. Each bull holds upper foreleg straight and extends it upward toward hero's head...Each bull has long curved horn that emerges from front of its head. Mane is indicated by outline along contour of neck that of bull at left has diagonal hatching; each bull is ithyphallic. Crescent is in upper terminal field; star is in middle terminal field. .. Garrison suggests that PFS 102 may be an office seal.
PF 154 and PF 155 are the earliest dated tablets with PFS 102 and are both dated 499/498 BCE.
PFS 778 Cat. No. 11 earliest dated application: 500/499 BCE. Ht. 1.2 cm... Creature to left has two wings indicated.
PFS 841. Cat. No. 13. Plant and bird in field.
PFS 38. Cat. No. 16. Human-headed bulls with wings. Sprays of lotus blossoms, buds and papyrus blossoms emerging from nimbus of stars...The seal is a personal seal of Irtaṣduna, wife of Darius I. She uses the seal to draw royal provisions.
Source: Garrison, Mark B. and Margaret Cool Root, Fortification tablets Vol. I, Images of Heroic Encounter, Oriental Institute Publications, Volume 117, Chicago... http://oi.uchicago.
The hieroglyphs mentioned herein have been read rebus on corpora of Indus writing:
kõdā खोंड [ khōṇḍa ] m A young bull, a bullcalf. (Marathi) Rebus 1: kọ̆nḍu or konḍu । कुण्डम् m. a hole dug in the ground for receiving consecrated fire (Kashmiri) Rebus 2: A. kundār, B. kũdār, °ri, Or. kundāru; H. kũderā m. ʻ one who works a lathe, one who scrapes ʼ, °rī f., kũdernā ʻ to scrape, plane, round on a lathe ʼ.(CDIAL 3297).
Anzu aslion-headed eagle concordant with amśu 'soma' (Rigveda)
eṟaka ‘wing’ (Telugu) Rebus: eraka ‘copper’(Kannada).
baṭa = quail (Santali) Rebus: baṭa = kiln (Santali); baṭa = a kind of iron (G.) bhaṭṭhī f. ‘kiln, distillery’, awāṇ. bhaṭh; P. bhaṭṭh m., °ṭhī f. ‘furnace’, bhaṭṭhā m. ‘kiln’; S. bhaṭṭhī keṇī ‘distil (spirits)’.
ṭagara = tabernae ontana (Skt.) Rebus: tagara 'tin'. damgar 'merchant'
Heb. tamar “palm tree, date palm.” Rebus: tam(b)ra = copper (Pkt.)
मेढा [ mēḍhā ] m A stake, esp. as forked. meḍ(h), meḍhī f., meḍhā m. ʻ post, forked stake ʼ.(Marathi)(CDIAL 10317) Rebus: mẽṛhẽt, meḍ ‘iron’ (Mu.Ho.)
kõṭ ‘horn’ gōta ‘sack’. Rebus: kũdār ‘turner, brass-worker’ khoṭa ʻingot
mũh ‘face’. Rebus: mũh metal ingot (Santali) mũhã̄ = the quantity of iron produced at one time in a native smelting furnace.
meḍha ‘polar star’ (Marathi) Rebus: meḍ ‘iron’ (Ho.Mu.) Allograph: meḍh ‘ram’.
Such abiding hieroglyphs are likely to be remembered associations with the smithy and metalware of meluhha artisans.
Notes on the role of Dilmun in Indus trade with contact areas:
Dilmun (present-day Bahrain) and Magan (or Makan, present-day Oman) of Arabian Peninsula had trade connections with the Indus. Maysar, Ra's al-Hadd and R'as al-Junayz -- sites in Oman; Tell Abrak (United Arab Emirates) -- sites in Bahrain and Failaka; Ur, Nippur, Kish and Susa -- sites in Mesopotamia between Tigris-Euphrates and in Elam, have provided evidence of Indus trade presence. Sutkagen-dor and Sokta-koh were ports near today's Iran border and indicate the role of sea-faring in Indus trade. A remote Indus trade outpost was perhaps Shortughai, on the Oxus in Afghanistan, beyond the Hindu Kush range of mountains.
Dilmun has produced seals with Indus inscription, Linear Elamite inscribed atop an Indus-stylized bull and a tablet with cuneiform -- all simultaneously being used ca. 2000 BCE:
"The presence in Dilmun of these three different writing systems ―de fabrication locale‖, meaning the co-existence of Linear Elamite, the Indus script, and lastly the Mesopotamian cuneiform, allsimultaneously being used ca. 2000 BCE (Glassner, Jean-Jacques. 1999.Dilmun et Magan: la place de lécriture.‖In Languages and Cultures in Contact: At the Crossroads of Civilizations in the Syro-Mesopotamian Realm(Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta), edited by Karel Van Lerberghe and Gabriela Voet, 133-44. Leuven: Peeters Press en Departement Oosterse Studies Glassner), does demonstrably argue in favour of what archaeology has already proven: that Dilmun‘s role as a leading commercial center in the Mesopotamian world-system also places it at the crossroads of civilizations as far as languages and cultureis concerned. (As Glassner notes, the fact that archaeological discoveries reveal these three writing systems to be coexisting andsimultaneously used in Dilmun at this time (ca. 2000 BC) is not at all inconceivable. He writes: “Trois écritures seraient doncsimultanément en usage, à Dilmun, autour de 2000, deux d’entre elles sont notées sur des cachets *le linéaire élamite etl’harrapéen+, la troisième *le cunéiforme mésopotamien+ l’est sur des tablettes. Le fait est parfaitement concevable: ne serait l’origine étrangère des trois écritures, la situation est tout à fait comparable à celle de la Crète où, dans la première moitié du 2 e millénaire, trois écritures coexistent dont l’une, notamment, de caractère linéaire (linéaire A), est notée sur des tablettes d’argile. On sait, d’autres part, que les Vay de Côte d’Ivoire utilisent également trois écritures.” (1999, 137)
As far as the reason for their usage, Glassner suspects that it had something to do with thecommercial trading activities occurring at this time (ibid., 137). In relation to discoveries made in Magan,they are also quite significantly comparable to the Dilmunite finds, and there has even been unearthed inMagan a locally fabricated seal which contains the same Indus signs as one discovered in Lothal, the ancientIndus port city (ibid.).It can therefore be observed that in many ways these archaeological findings do establish somelegitimate grounds for discussing the shared linguistic and/or cultural hybridity (or plurality) of the societiesof Magan (Oman), Dilmun (Bahrain), and Meluhha (Indus). The fact that these same three lands are oftenmentioned together in the Mesopotamian (cuneiform) records and even ―often in the same sentence‖, as Bibby (1969, 219) remarks does lend further support to the archaeological finds in making valid cross-cultural links between these ancient peoples. Not unlike the ancient Dilmunites, it would not then be entirelyinconceivable to think of the Indus businesspeople as similarly being exposed to these other contemporarywriting systems, most notably such as those of neighbouring Elam (either the proto-Elamite or later LinearElamite script) or the Mesopotamian cuneiform that dominated the Gulf trade in which they were actively engaged".(Paul D. LeBlanc, 2012, The Indus culture and writing system in contact, The Ottawa Journal of Religion, La Revue des sciences des religions d'Ottawa, Vol. 4, 2012, No. 4, 2012).